The Moz Blog

Panda 4.0, Payday Loan 2.0 & eBay's Very Bad Day

After a period of relative quiet, MozCast detected a major "temperature" spike in Google's algorithm at some point on Monday, May 19th. This occurred after some historic lows, including the 3rd coldest day on record (May 11th).

Less than an hour earlier, Search Engine Land confirmed the
Payday Loan 2.0 update. This ended a weekend of wild speculation (including many predictions of a Penguin update), but didn't leave us with many details about the timeframe or the impact.

Which update was which?

For the moment, we're going to have to speculate a bit. If the latest iteration of the Payday Loan update is like the first, it hit hard but fairly narrowly. Google laser-targeted some very spammy verticals with Payday Loan 1.0 (back on June 11, 2013), but the overall impact was moderate. That update was also very query-specific. My gut reaction is that it was unlikely that the May 19th update was Payday Loan 2.0 - that update was probably smaller and rolled out over the weekend (possibly May 16th). There was heavy flux around a few potentially spammy queries on May 16th, including "mortgage rate trends" and "cheap apartments", but competitive queries tend to change frequently, so the evidence is unclear.

Google's numbering scheme suggests that Panda 4.0 is a major update, which probably means that it is both an algorithmic update and a data refresh. This typically means substantial rankings flux, and I think that's much more likely connected to what we're seeing on May 19th. While Matt's tweet implies a roll-out on May 20th, most Panda updates over the past year have been multi-day roll-outs. We should know more in the next few days.

What happened to eBay?

Digging into the May 19th data (and before Google confirmed anything), I noticed that a few keywords seemed to show losses for eBay, and the main eBay sub-domain fell completely out of the "
Big 10" (our metric of the ten domains with the most "real estate" in the top 10). Sites shift, and nothing on the level of a keyword means much, so I took a look at the historical eBay data. This is eBay's share of top 10 rankings for the past week across the MozCast 10K (approximately 94,000 URLs, since not all page-1 SERPs have ten results):

Over the course of about three days, eBay fell from #6 in our Big 10 to #25. Change is the norm for Google's SERPs, but this particular change is clearly out of place, historically speaking. eBay has been #6 in our Big 10 since March 1st, and prior to that primarily competed with Twitter.com for either the #6 or #7 place. The drop to #25 is very large. Overall, eBay has gone from right at 1% of the URLs in our data set down to 0.28%, dropping more than two-thirds of the ranking real-estate they previously held.

It is entirely possible that this is temporary, and it's not my intention to "out" eBay – I have no idea if they've done anything that merits major ranking changes. This could be a technical issue or a mistake on Google's part. It's also worth noting that these results only track the main eBay sub-domain (www.ebay.com), not other ranking sub-domains, including popular.ebay.com.

What exactly did eBay lose?

Looking just at the day-over-day change from May 19-20, I dug into the keywords that eBay lost out on, hoping to find some clues about the broader Google updates. The vast majority of losses were where eBay had one top 10 ranking and then fell out of the top 10. In three cases, eBay lost two top 10 rankings for a single keyword phrase. Those phrases were:

"fiber optic christmas tree"

"tongue rings"

"vermont castings"

Here's what the top 10 looked like for that first phrase (sub-domain only) on May 19th:

www.kmart.com

www.walmart.com

www.americansale.com

www.sears.com

www.amazon.com

www.christmascentral.com

www.ebay.com

www.ebay.com

www.bronners.com

www.ask.com

eBay held the #7 and #8 spots. Here's the top 10 for the next morning, May 20th:

www.kmart.com

www.walmart.com

www.sears.com

www.amazon.com

www.americansale.com

www.christmascentral.com

www.bronners.com

www.hayneedle.com

www.dhgate.com

www.alibaba.com

It's interesting to note that both eBay losses here were category pages, not specific products. Here's one example (from
this eBay URL):

For the other two keywords where eBay lost two positions in the top 10, the lost URLs were also category or sub-category pages (not individual auction listings). The remaining losses were either situations where eBay went from two listings to one or one to zero.

Here are the top 25 keywords where eBay lost one top 10 ranking position, ordered by their MozCast temperature:

"beats by dr dre" (231°)

"honeywell thermostat" (190°)

"hooked on phonics" (188°)

"fajate" (188°)

"batman costume" (181°)

"lenovo tablet" (181°)

"pyramid collection" (170°)

"hampton bay" (170°)

"jordan 11 concord" (168°)

"pontoon boats for sale" (168°)

"mockingjay pin" (166°)

"kobe vii" (166°)

"food trucks for sale" (166°)

"galaxy s2" (166°)

"jordan spizike" (163°)

"foamposite" (163°)

"george foreman grill" (161°)

"wholesale jerseys" (161°)

"tend skin" (161°)

"fender stratocaster" (161°)

"rims for sale" (161°)

"shed plans" (158°)

"hello kitty vans" (158°)

"cheap used cars" (158°)

"lilly pulitzer bedding" (156°)

It's very hard to interpret individual keyword changes, but, not surprisingly, many of these phrases seem to be products and product categories, and some are fairly competitive. Most of these drops seem to be from lower positions in the top 10 – I was unable to find a case where eBay lost a #1 ranking day-over-day.

In one case, it appears that both "www.ebay.com" and "popular.ebay.com" lost out. Here are the top 10 sub-domains for May 19th for the query "hooked on phonics":

www.hookedonphonics.com

itunes.apple.com

www.amazon.com

en.wikipedia.org

www.youtube.com

popular.ebay.com

popular.ebay.com

www.ebay.com

www.time4learning.com

www.walmart.com

...and here's the same SERP the morning of May 20th:

www.hookedonphonics.com

learntoread.hookedonphonics.com

itunes.apple.com

en.wikipedia.org

www.youtube.com

popular.ebay.com

www.amazon.com

www.amazon.com

thekrazycouponlady.com

hip2save.com

One page on "popular.ebay.com" kept its spot (this category page), but two narrower category pages lost out. In this particular example, Amazon picked up a top 10 spot, although their highest position dropped. Both Amazon URLs were for specific products, although it's important not to generalize too much from one example.

What does it mean for you?

I'm sorry to say that it's probably too soon to tell. We're hearing reports of big losses and gains, which is the norm for any major update – for every winner, there's a loser. If Google is to be believed, we're looking at two sizable updates in the span of a long weekend. It's possible we'll see even more changes before the US holiday weekend (Memorial Day), so I'd strongly suggest keeping your eyes open.

Update (May 21st - 9:30AM)

Good follow-up post from Rishi Lakhani about eBay's internal linking structure. Digging deeper, it looks like all of the URLs of the form "ebay.com/bhp" have disappeared from the rankings, at least within our data set. We've collected another day's worth of data since the post was written, and the situation hasn't changed. This could be a manual action on Google's part, but it's hard to tell.

Google is now saying that Panda 4.0 impacted 7.5% of English-language queries. Despite Matt's "...starting today" statement on May 20th, I (and others) strongly believe the Panda 4.0 roll-out may have begun over the weekend, and is connected to the May 19th temperature spike.

117 Comments

it's always hard doing a conclusive analysis just after the announcement of an update, but I thank you because of the job you did in this post, because it may offer us ideas.

As others (and I too) commented in the comment thread to your Mozcast update yesterday on Google+, it seems that eBay may have been hit by Panda 4.0 because of the huge amount of duplicates its subdomains (and I would tell also eBay stores) cause.

If this is true, then I consider that a great area of investigation should be seeing how many sites that tend to have cross-domains duplication issues for any possible reason (i.e.: bad International SEO implementation with same language versions) were targeted by the update.

Google did confirm to me that it was the spammy query algo (aka "payday loan algo") that went live over the weekend, while Panda began rolling out Tuesday. Normally Panda is over a ten day period, although this one definitely hit with a bang straight out of the gate.

Google sure likes to make it confusing for people! When Penguin first rolled out on April 24, 2012, it was sandwiched in between a Panda update on April 19 and April 27. Many people didn't know what hit them. When the EMD algo rolled out, Google announced two days later that, "Oh, by the way, we also released a Panda update a few days ago." That caused a LOT of confusion. Many people who thought they were knocked out by EMD got hit by Panda.

And now, they've released a major Panda update and the Payday loans update at essentially the same time...and who knows, perhaps Penguin is coming?

I think that their goal is to try to make webmasters stop thinking about how they can game Google and just concentrate on making a great site. But really, it's just confusing a whole lot of people!

I agree with Marie on believing that Google is making it harder for webmasters who are trying to "game" SEO. Google wants to show results that are relevant, contain great content, and make the end user satisfied. But, Google has to deal with below par sites trying to make themselves "appear" legit.

If Google released one update or change at a time, then it makes it easier for webmasters to see what has helped or hurt their site (and even the competitions sites). Once they figure out what "works", then they just go and replicate what works on a mass scale...hence why there are so many fake directories out there (basically link farms), because that was what worked at one time. Then, they complain when Google finds out about it and slaps them with a penalty.

It could be a coincidence that Google released these updates so close together, with Penguin patiently waiting to dive in. But, I wouldn't be suprised if Google continues multiple updates at one time to make it harder to "game" Google.

The Payday Loan update isn't as likely to impact big sites, unless they specifically play in those spaces. What happened to eBay may be a result of something they did, but if it's algorithmic, it's much more likely to be Panda.

Not sure why I didn't dig into this earlier, but I ran a search for any results with "ebay.com/bhp" in the URL, and they've all disappeared over the past three days. eBay lost ranking on all URLs of that format (in our data set).

My small clients who have good content on each of their website pages (500+ words) did not get any hit. But, fingers crossed. Let’s see what happens in coming days. Sometimes a hit to big business becomes an opportunity for small business owners - if they know how to capitalize it :-)

Finally the speculations has ended, People were talking about the Penguin's update but Google roles 2 updates on a same day. I'd like to know what can be the possible reasons behind launching the both updates on a same day? Are they complement each other in any manner? and what do you think which kind of sites are the hot favorites to be hunted down by these updates.

Hi pete, are other huge retailers like walmart or amazon (with millions of pages of content) also losing rankings overall - i see that you've provided a few examples for a few specific keywords - i'm interested in the overall picture. Can you quantify what's happening there?

I'm not seeing substantial movement in the "Big 10", other than Amazon. Within the ten, sites moved up to fill Amazon's spot, but it doesn't seem like any one site saw huge gains. I haven't dug deeply into the top 25/50/etc. though. I've heard rumors of big gains for some sites.

I'm confused, did Amazon lose a lot of rankings? The article only mentions eBay's losses.

Ebay will have a lot of SEO vulnerability compared to Amazon because they have each seller create a new page every time they list a product. Amazon combines all of the offers for the same product on one page. It reduces duplicate content and increases the amount of content on each page.

Why worrying about any google updates that might come in the future. Concentrate on building a high engaging website with good Content. Watch Wihite Board Friday. Rand Fiskin is my personal hero. He describes in detail who to become a brand. Forget about stupid linkbuilding. Just reach out for relevant users with great content. That is the white hat sercret which works. So you don´t have to think aobut any possible update.

Happy to say that Panda 4.0 was good to me, all my niche keywords are on a boost now. I always thought that content is the best way to achieve rankings. Today Google finally confirm it to my sites.
Ebay has strange link architecture for a while, I think they will uprank soon.

First Penguin then Panda .. I am not sure which cute animal will soon be hated by webmasters! At least G00gle is now using their iterations (Panda 3.0 and Panda 4 and so on)..otherwise animals will be exhausted one day . :-)

I read Both Yours and Rishi Lakhan Blog, a great Analysis by him and it was again upexpected results from google after Updates. So trend of Aftershocks has been set. Still i have checked and there ebay's gain its position and Amazon has been benefited to does it have any relation with a famous "Television Advertise" of Amazon and Also Amazon.in ?

I work mainly with small, niche ecommerce businesses and since Hummingbird have seen a lot of long tail product search results absolutely dominated by ebay and amazon. One particular example I tested gave 5 ebay pages in the top 10. If the latest update improves the diversity of the search results then it's a good thing.

From the research provided and through reading other blogs around this subject, it certainly looks as though eBay had it coming with their low-quality gateway pages with limited content. Unfortunately, this is a trait that is becoming increasingly familiar within large websites in the last few years. Certainly the subject of creating gateway pages that aggregate either internal or external products/ pages is something that Google should crack down on. However, I still think there isn't a coincidence that eBay wrote a paper based on the low-quality of Adwords and how they are now going to use SEO more and more and this drop. From Google's perspective, they lost millions of pounds from eBay cutting their Adwords spend; maybe this is a "forced hand" of spend with us. I hate to say it, but I agree with Google's decision here, the pages that lost traffic are poor quality, and not user-led.

Thanks for the post Pete and updates, I think we should wait for more data before we all get too excited...ebay have definitely lost the plot recently, they have increased their commissions by taking a slice of the postage costs from their sellers as well.

Three weeks later Ebay has risen from the dead and I'm now seeing dominant ranking once again from Ebay. But my observation is... the pages which are ranking high are identified with /sch/ in the directory. The pages are indeed simply search pages and in some cases these pages are not typically linked from the main architecture of eBay. i.e. I can't find pages on ebay linking to these pages which I found prominently in Google search.

I thought the consensus was to noindex search result pages? But clearly, Ebay is benefiting from the index of their search result pages. Should I be opening up our search pages and let Google run wild on 2,000,000 possible search terms I might have on my ecommerce site?

I'm seeing weak recovery at best from eBay at this point. The pages they lost on were classic thin content, so they won't be able to "fix" them. They're going to have to try to get other pages ranking in their place, and that may be an uphill climb.

I would not follow their lead on search result pages, generally speaking, or really any big brand. Sites with massive authority can get away with a fair amount of bad on-page SEO and site architecture, because they have the link profile to support it. Even if you're a mega-brand and have that kind of authority, you're better off consolidating that power on your money terms.

Of course, the trick is that it's all a trade-off. Spinning out those result pages let eBay rank on a ton of long-tail terms, and they had the authority to spread around. I'd argue, though, that, even without a penalty, that tactic may have been diluting other more critical terms. I'd hard to say, but it's definitely a gamble. It takes deep knowledge of the site in question to calculate that risk.

Our views from Google dropped about 60% with this update, and we're a site that pushes regular original content and news pieces. Still getting the hang of this, any suggestions on where to start to figure out what I need to fix?

Please tell me how to get rid of those urls which are present somewhere in the web and generating 404 when crawled by google since they are not present in the site without redirecting as too many redirection can cause the panda penalty.

Pete, Thanks for sharing this. I am sure its a bad days for eBay, but my question is, don't you think that what Google mentioned was giving an opportunity to small businesses. I hope thats not what they are intending to do here by subsiding the giants.

Again, to further question this, I would like to understand, how any SEO expert can come to a strategic plan for the website if they keep on changing their algorithms so often, and always name it "Fighting Spam".

Some of our websites have also noticed hike in rankings, which I don't think they should have been and some of our websites have substantially gone dark.

Anyways, I would appreciate if you can throw some lights on my questions.

SEO world has completely changed due to major updates by Google so all SEO professionals must work in a very ethical way to avoid all kind of penalties. I thinks, after “Panda 4.0 and Payday Loan 2.0 update” 21st may is definitely a “Judgement Day” for spammers. Thanks for writing the fantastic post Dr. Pete.

I am expecting all exact match anchor text to be the prime targets of Panda 2.0. Also, if for any search query, the destination page does not link to the content that it specifies for, then it is most likely to punished with this algorithm. However, excellent post from Rajiv. We still need to wait and watch about the cons and what all is targeted in this update. Internal linking structure is also expected to be one of the factors. But, as Dr. Pete says, keep your eyes open for the memorial day surprise coming up. Thanks for the analysis Dr. Pete.

I strongly believe Ebay will return back to its previous positions as we all know how bis is Ebay. I checked some of the keywords which were in top 10 and now they are between 20-30 position. I am really shocked when I read the article, it was really quick article made on Google Panda 4.0 and Payday Loan 2.0 update, Moz, I am impressed!!!

ya i felt bad for eBay .. that was bad day.. but max site not affected i think so .. my site (www.augustasoftsol.com) not affected .. and my friend company got good place and rank increased . so if we follow white hat and update thing we can escape from panda..

Pretty small, IMO. The way their loss was targeted is suggesting more of a manual action, and it's very likely due to the thin content itself. Plus, while the ranking loss coincided with the timing of eBay's announcement, the actual breach apparently happened a couple of months ago.

I assume it's possible that it happened months ago but Google found out about it around the same time we did (the public). If it was manual action, I can see a scenario where Google is saying, "Sounds like eBay may be having some security issues. Let's not send a massive amount of traffic there until the issue is resolved to reduce the amount of people who may possibly become affected - as well as a form of punishment to eBay for having subpar security and in a way telling them to upgrade their security if they want to get back on page 1." This seems to make total sense to me, but I'll be honest, I have not looked into the details of the penalization as much as other people have, so I'm really just speculating.

Google Panda 4.0 filtered the low-quality websites with little or poor content. eBay is not a low-quality site but most of their pages do not have much content. If they have some reviews and discussion about products on their page, they might not get hurt with latest update. Content vs Link ratio on eBay pages is not good at all. It is a lesson for other small businesses owners too.

Bad luck for eBay. I think that they will not running their SEO campaign. Yet Google caught them.

Don`t know how others are getting panda effect. However, I guess my website is going toward the positive direction after this update. As I noticed improvement in Keywords position after 19th may. Thank God!

Quote: "There was heavy flux around a few potentially spammy queries on May 16th, including "mortgage rate trends" and "cheap apartments", but competitive queries tend to change frequently, so the evidence is unclear."

Investors Group in Canada announced a 1.99% mortgage rate on May 13, which has caused a lot discussion and I expect internet activity. Could this be the reason for the spike in "mortgage rate trends" keywords?

It's entirely possible. I gave those as examples that popped out at me, but as I said in the post, it's really difficult to tell from just eyeballing a few dozen keywords. The May16th spike (around 80 degrees) was on par with the first Payday Loan update last year, but beyond that, I don't have hard evidence.

In the morning when I saw the post on Google + about these update I was shocked to see Panda 4.0; because I was expecting Penguin to come up but it was Panda and also Payday Loan 2.0 update happen last night. Is there any chance of Penguin update to happen in coming few weeks?

But Thank God this time I am secure in fact the traffic of one of my website is increased by 35% :)

Yes I agreed with you @Dr.Peter! We have to keep open our eyes as this time 2 major updates have been updated by Google. This time ~7.5% of queries have been affected so every webmaster should be aware of that along with the eCommerce websites.

I was expecting such post as MozCast and other tool have given the sign of algorithm update. It seems that this update might be good for small business. You nailed by doing some great analysis on ebay, Thanks.

Thanks Dr.Pete, curious if rankings will stay as they are or will shuffle down in a week or two. Also wondering how many more "tweaks" to this updates we can expect in the following month. Thanks again for getting up informed.

The travel industry seems to be doing good in that case. Have run some test cases in the UK market and Latin American countries though. Keen to read out more stuff and conclusive posts about Panda 4.0I am thankful to Dr. Pete for this quick insight.

How does eBay feel about this? None too happy I'd imagine. But what can they do, and was it their fault? Who created those product categories that were stripped away? Was there some foul play in how those were set up? It also seems to me that once was alright is now not, and sites are being penalized with no warning. Was their a warning? Was the warning sufficient?

We're talking lost revenue here and I'm wondering if legal cases can be made that algorithmic changes adversely affected one business at the expense of another, and through no fault of its own. How can it be their fault when the rug was pulled out from under them, which updates like these often seem to be. After all, no one really knows what's going on, or what to expect, right?

I mean, we're talking jobs here. Local communities that rely on that income. Tax bases eroding. Sure, it might not be that bad now, but what about in 5 years when an algorithm change comes along and causes a panic or a recession in the markets? Then what?

In this particular case, I really do think that eBay was treading the line, and potentially using these pages primarily for SEO benefit. They're pretty thin content, and they're linked internally in a way that doesn't provide much benefit for users. Whether it was a manual penalty or Panda 4.0, these are the kind of pages that Google has been warning about since before even the first Panda update. They've made a lot of money off of ranking for pages that are of dubious quality, and that means someone else didn't make money. It cuts both ways, IMO.

Yeah, eBay's big enough and has enough staff. They surely had some SEO folks telling them. Perhaps they even cleaned up a lot of stuff and what happened to them could have been a lot worse than we realize.

Yeah, Dr. Peter, your opinion is exactly what I thought after studying your whole story as well as eBay content status. I would like to find the clarified ending on the issues on eBay against accusing to Google Panda update so that SEO lovers could find the clear paths of Google's movement. Thanks Peter.

There seems to be growing evidence that eBay's situation was a manual penalty and not caused by Panda 4.0 (or, Panda was at best part of the problem). The very targeted way that certain kinds of pages fell out of the index looks more manual than Panda-related, and insiders are saying that Google took action against eBay. I can't confirm that with confidence at this point.

Their search losses are significant, but that's just one piece of their marketing, and we don't know what the timeframe will be like. If this drop lasts long enough to impact quarterly earnings, then we'd likely see real fallout. I'm not sure that's likely, though. If the mainstream press picked up on it, that could, of course, have an impact, too. The mainstream press tends to just hear "blah blah blah" when we talk, though :)

Thanks for all of the information about the newest Panda update. I was surprised to see this update didn't address alot of the spammy facebook posts and wordpress blogs that have ecommerce items listed with affiliate links to Amazon.

This reminds me of the old Moz "SEO Expert Quiz" - one question specifically talks about the scenario of having an auction site (eBay) and where you should redirect expired product listings (correct answer: to that product's category via 301).

There is no one way to specify the impact of the hit so soon. As the update takes some days to finish it will be a very interesting and panicky situation (in some cases) for the webmasters to see the change in ranking. Ebay and other big names taking a -ve impact on product pages is something unexpected but at the same time there are phases in which there is a good upward movement for some new keywords (as seen in the 'Deconstructing eBay.com’s Organic Loss Using SEMrush" by Rishi Lakhani) and this is why I am keen to read a full case study on this update once it is over with.

Great post Dr. Pete as always. Can you add your thoughts on eBay's share of top 10 rankings dropping significantly and the fact that they announced this morning that they had been hacked? It seems a curious coincidence that both would happen within a few days of each other. Any chance that Google was aware earlier than the general public that there was a security issue?

As curious as the timing is, I really think that was just a coincidence. Digging into this eBay issue, it's a very specific subset of pages that really do look to have thin content issues. Since the hack didn't bring down the site, inject malware, etc., it's unlikely it had much in the way of SEO repercussions.

You really don't think it's possible that Google could temporarily penalize them? They're always saying they want to display the most relevant results possible, so I'd think they wouldn't want to send people to eBay while they're vulnerable.

For what queries do you see Yahoo and Bing having the better search accuracy? I find Bing has some really offbeat answers for some queries, though is fine on many of them, but Google has a fresher and deeper index.

I agree with you. Keri, no other search engine actively work like Google and do deeper index. Google is the only search engine that index more and allow more spammer. Whereas bing index lesser but accuracy will be maintained.

Another update by Google, only to convey the message to the webmaster community that please concentrate on the development of a real great website with impressive content, design and architecture. Don't ever try to predict the Google's algorithmic changes and to find a simple way out to rank.

Great article! I wonder how much the data used in this analysis was actually affected by the apparent hack into eBay, as opposed to the Panda update? Here's the article I read that talks about the hack...coincidental or the cause of problem?